Storms Pose Pr Crisis For Utilities

December 4, 2005|By Jeff Zbar Special Correspondent

To Dominick Barbera, BellSouth failed in its customer service and communications after Hurricane Wilma.

More than a month after the storm hit, Barbera and his wife, Beverly, have no phone service in their Southwest Ranches home. Neighbors in Weston to the north have service. So does his next-door neighbor.

Further frustrating him, Barbera said customer service representatives haven't provided a straight answer to explain the hangup in restoring his service. "It seems like they don't even know themselves," said Barbera, a home-based official with the International Association of Fire Fighters who can't work because his DSL broadband service is out.

To 15,000 BellSouth customers in Broward, and marketing communications executives who work for area utilities, Hurricane Wilma was a test of their crisis management plans. Now that most outages have been fixed, the question arises: How well did the utilities do in communicating what they needed to and how badly tarnished are their images?

Crisis communications is a public relations field unto itself. Marketing departments conduct drills and train on how to respond to a crisis. The rapid-fire spread of news and rumors by Internet and worldwide news services has forced the need for immediate reaction to curtail bad publicity, whether from an accident, product malfunction or corporate malfeasance. The objective: Manage the release of information well to limit damage to your image.

Such damage can be devastating. Dow Corning suffered a black mark after corporate inaction and a perceived lack of sympathy for women who said they were harmed by its silicon breast implants, said Leonard Saffir, a Lake Worth PR veteran.

Conversely, Johnson & Johnson's handling of a 1982 case of cyanide poisoning of its Tylenol product shows how a brand can be saved by reacting quickly. The company pulled products from store shelves until tamper-resistant packaging had been implemented, Saffir said. Company CEO James Burke was open to the media and "clearly presented management's commitment to fighting for the company's rights and its reputation," Saffir said.

After Hurricane Wilma roared through the southern tip of Florida's peninsula, the first wave of communications was critical. Shell-shocked customers wanted information about current conditions and time estimates for resumption of service. For South Florida's three counties, the number of homes in the dark was about 98 percent.

Worst-case is best idea

In the face of such a grim picture, FPL's best move was one of its first, Saffir said.

Instead of being over-optimistic, the utility promised resumption of service close to a month out, Saffir said. When power returned to his neighborhood five days after Wilma passed through, "I said, `Bless you, FPL,'" Saffir recalled.

By giving out a worst-case scenario, the company "scared people up front," leaving them dreading weeks without electricity but pleased if power returned sooner, he said. BellSouth, alternatively, left Saffir wanting. His DSL service was down, and repair people were unable to provide a consistent answer on when he should expect service to return.

"Companies have to explain their outages and do it fast," said Saffir, a longtime corporate PR veteran whose most recent book devotes 18 pages to "The Secrets of Crisis Communications." Among his tips: Centralize the flow of information through a crisis team to keep the message uniform and constant; contain, but don't suppress the news and facts; rehearse a strategy based on the worst-case scenario.

Marta Casas-Celaya, Florida area director for regulatory and external affairs for BellSouth, feels for customers like Barbera, one of more than 35,000 customers still without phone service in the tri-county area.

But the company has tried to get the message out about its challenge in repairing the phone network, she said. As head of the crisis communications effort, Casas-Celaya has issued daily advisories to the statewide media, as well as updates to the BellSouth.com Web site and in print and radio ads.

BellSouth's message "was out there," she said. "Believe me."

"All you can do is try to continue to educate them about the technology," she said. "There will always be someone who has not absorbed the message. It's like advertising, you repeat it three times and you hope they get it."

Treading more gingerly

Bad timing can be another problem after a disaster, as FPL learned. Two weeks after the hurricane, FPL went before the Public Service Commission to request an increase in its fuel adjustment charge.

"I question whether they actually consulted with their PR department, because I can't imagine a communications person would have been comfortable with that," said Ellen Crane Shulman, a veteran of Fortune 500 corporate communications and now president of Proseplus Inc., a Lighthouse Point communications consultancy. "Wait a month [to announce the increase request], because people are so raw from not having power for so long."